HeavenlyPossum @HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
Public

So did real wages actually increase under Biden? Yes, it seems they did, by a bit, towards the end.

And does that contradict peoples’ general assessment of the economy as bad in some way? No, not at all.

People were still dying earlier, and harming themselves more frequently, and losing their homes, and birthing shorter children all through Biden’s administration, because the processes of late stage capitalism exceed the grasp of any presidential administration.

This doesn’t explain Trump’s re-election, because Trump is simply accelerating the destruction of the US working class. But it does help explain the public’s discontent with an economy that appears, to some pundits, to have been quite good because people had treats.

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HeavenlyPossum @HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
Public

Part of me can’t help but wonder how much we can attribute to the realization in 2020, by many Americans, that the economy really could be structured otherwise and the collective power of the public really could be mobilized—even if just by the US government—to make lives better.

From direct stimulus payments to child tax credits to freezes on rental evictions and student debt, people were introduced to the idea that the federal government could just *shut off* so many of the extractive and impoverishing mechanisms of late stage capitalism.

And then, under Biden, in order to “get back to normal,” all of that went away.

cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-

So perhaps as everyone was being robbed via inflation, at least the inkling of an idea might have occurred to people that the state could have, but chose not to, help them.

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Expiration of Pandemic Relief Led to Record Increases in Poverty and Child Poverty in 2022

Overall poverty and child poverty rose in 2022 by the largest amounts on record in data back to 1967, a sharp retreat from the historic progress made during the COVID-19 pandemic.

www.cbpp.org · Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

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